Evening dinners with colleagues and friends is always a great opportunity to just get to know each other and to more informally discuss some of the issues and concerns of the day. Last night was such a dinner. What made this dinner more special what that CodeGear advisor and former CEO, Ben Smith was present. It is always great to hear his stories about different goings on in various sectors of Silicon Valley. The best conversation was in the parking lot after the dinner where Ben, Michael and myself stood in the mild drizzle for nearly 30 minutes discussing things like Borland moving their HQ to Austin, blogging, team focus, and some various radical thoughts about Delphi and it's market.
Throughout the various conversations, I was reminded of how much we all think about the CodeGear business from such varying perspectives and insights. It is always great to bounce ideas off other members of the team because they always put a new spin or insight on that thought. Which is another point of this post. What kinds of things do we think about all the time? In no particular order or even priority; Win32/64, Aspects, Generics, Dynamic languages, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Rails, ASP.NET, .NET, Vista, MacOS, Linux, WinMobile, GC in Win32, Multi-Core, DirectX, XML, XAML... I think I could continue for several more paragraphs with just listing all the things that I and the rest of the team thinks about. The number of technologies in the developer tools space is staggering, just as the number of developers out there continues to significantly grow, especially in various emerging markets such as Russia, India and China.
As CodeGear continues to charge ahead, you will start to see some actions taken surrounding some of the above items and even some I didn't. I got various comments to my post about Borland moving its HQ to Austin saying that CodeGear can finally bring back the “old Borland.” I agree that it would be nice since there is a lot of excellent things about those times. However, what we are doing is have CodeGear define its own identity and culture. Sure, we'll take a lot from the “glory days” of Borland, but the developer and technology landscape has changed, so we also need to change. I think we've got a good start and are continuing to refine and define things.
Oh, what were those radical thoughts about Delphi? It's way too early to say. I'll just say that we have radical and crazy thoughts all the time and some of them we actually take action on. Delphi 2007 was one such thought only 5 months ago.
People should really let go of the "old Borland". It was defined by the people who worked for Borland back then, the technological landscape of the past, the competition of yesterday. CodeGear is defined by the people who are there now and what they can achieve in the present and future. It is interesting that Allen didn't even mention JBuilder. I honestly think CodeGear's JBuilder resources can be better allocated somewhere else. This is a product that won't help CodeGear financially. Btw, I am typing this inside Delphi2007 IDE browser and looks like the carriage return does not work. This is a known bug for TWebBrowser on memo fields. IDL
ReplyDeleteAllen,
ReplyDeleteYou do realize, don't you, that since you provided that list people will decide that you said "We're working on Delphi for OSX" or "We're working on Delphi for Ruby" or "We're working on a new version of Kylix". And then they'll complain because no one at CG will confirm it publicly...
It's a shame, but it always happens.
I, for one, am extremely happy with the direction it appears CG is headed, and I'm looking forward to what comes next. :-)
Ken,
ReplyDeleteOf course they'll think that. There's no way to stop that. Many folks tend to read way to much into what was and wasn't said instead of actually concentrating on the words. *You* may know that I was merely saying that we always think about a lot of different things related to Delphi... but alas there will always be those that will like to stir the pot. But that won't stop me from saying that we *think* about this stuff. I would rather demonstrate that we do think ahead and look at present and future technology/industry trends. The last thing I want to do is give the impression that we're so stuck in the past that we're blinded to the future. I think the collateral fallout from the vocal minority is just the cost of doing business.
Allen.
IDL,
ReplyDeleteCase in point. You immediately glommed onto what I *didn't* say rather than just reading about what I *did* say. There is no conspiracy or agenda in my statements against JBuilder. In fact, JBuilder is in excellent hands by a very capable team. This is a blog that is mainly about Delphi since that is where I've spent most of my tenure. I still deeply respect the team and all that is being done around JBuilder. I also know enough to know when I should offer my advice and opinions and when I should just let them do their job.
Allen.
In my humble opinion, the next great leap in software development should be the user interface. If Delphi developers would be offered the access to WPF technology through a VCL and designer, it would give them an edge again. If this were to be provided for Win32's Delphi, it would give them control over the universe. ;)
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether anything like this is in the works, but I bet it'd make Delphi a very popular tool once more.
In my opinion, the real cost of doing business is the inability of not making a profit because of inferior products, ill advised management decisions and unhappy customers. The vocal minority is just an indirect consequence of these.
ReplyDelete"Sometimes a horse needs a kick on its side in order to gallop"
IDL
Allen,
ReplyDeleteHere is a must do for you guys....
Add integrated subversion support to Delphi and Delphi for PHP. Also for D4PHP it really needs SFTP and FTP remote editing and deployment along with remote debugging.
Later,
Tony Caduto